


The Devil's in the Details

by The Kat Valentine (Defenestratio)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Corruption AU, F/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Mindfuck, Redemption AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-17 11:41:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1386355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defenestratio/pseuds/The%20Kat%20Valentine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...And Alana Bloom hopes they're written in pencil.</p><p>After Lecter's incarceration, Alana Bloom is left partially fragmented. Hannibal Lecter was her best friend and now he's some kind of monster shut up in the dark basement of an insane asylum, and she thinks it would have been better to die than to know that. Caught between both a life she knew and a life she hasn't quite come to understand, when Hannibal escapes and runs to Greece, she coercively insists she go with him. Reluctant, he lets her, but damn it all if he knows why, and from there maybe, she has to know and, more than anything, maybe she has to see if she can find what was once her best friend. She's a psychiatrist, a healer. Maybe she has to know if she can heal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: To Run

**Author's Note:**

> So after literally thirteen years of over-analyzing Hannibal Lecter, I’m finally writing a fanfiction where I get to over-analyze Hannibal Lecter, thanks to the awesome characters Bryan Fuller has given the fandom. I will warn that this canon’s Hannibal is my own interpretation and can be odd on a lot of levels, but I’m going to try my best to explain everything I can and I’m going to fill in gaps, I swear. This Alana Bloom belongs to a very good friend of mine who has characterized her in the most interesting light I have ever had the pleasure of reading. This AU works off the idea that season 2 hasn’t happened as we know it right now (the whole thing was a roleplay written long before season 2) and I’ll be taking ideas from it as I go, but otherwise, operate under the assumption that season 1 is your canon and this is more or less my season 3 or so, I guess. I don’t know, I’m rambling. But this is a hell of a labor of love. I own nobody and nothing. Welcome to my attempt at reforming Hannibal Lecter in the best way I know how, with Alana Bloom’s help.

Clarice Starling comes into their lives and leaves a scent like earth burned beneath the hammer-blow of a lightning strike. Hannibal behind glass and Alana Bloom a specter of herself, desperately clinging to the freed Will Graham in a fragile sort of happiness that drips off life's canvas like running oil paints. And her heart is in that Baltimore Asylum, shut up in the dark at a sub-level so buried the only things that can reach it are the hopeless clicks of her heels at every agonized visit. There's pretense that she wants to understand him, treat him, learn him. But he looks at her with the same burgundy eyes she remembers as a young, bright-eyed intern and she doesn't know where to find herself. Every single time he strips away his usual condescending intimidation and asks her something personal, refers to something past, she is miniature again, a little girl, too small to feel like Alana Marie Bloom has ever felt.

 But she can't stop visiting him. He's left something in her deeper than a gash. It's confusing, and it feels like what might be self-inflicted. She's walking around with the knife in her back and he stuck it there, even if she held a gun on him in shaking hands and he froze before biting the blade into her flesh. His freeze got him caught, and his catch has him under Dr. Chilton's unforgiving, cruel ownership. Chilton must own him, after all. This is Frederick Chilton's Zoo for Dangerous Wildlife and Hannibal Lecter is like his exotic Komodo Dragon.

 His destruction of her had been a complete cycle, the most perfect circle. It's perfect because she still expects to pick up the phone to tell him something important, to call him to ask if he wants to have dinner, to ask him if he wants to have a glass of wine or four over an old Bela Lugosi film.

 But the only line she can call leads straight to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There's no wine there. No Chateu De Petrus (sometimes too wealthy for her palette, she thinks). The only movies that play are the ones Hannibal Lecter has memorized behind his eyes, and they're made for a one person audience. 

 The best way to destroy someone, after all, is from the inside-out. Like the chest burster from Alien, of course. Inhabit the person completely (so completely they don't even know you're sitting inside them) and then just claw out of their ribcage with completely malicious abandon. There's a way to mutilate a heart, and it isn't physical.

 She doesn't eat much. She hardly eats at all. Eating is something unbearable, now that she knows she has been eating human mystery meat for uncountable years. It's a lot of store-bought salads, picked at and forgotten, and every single thing under the sun without a single relation to meat. The very idea of steak is enough for her to taste bile. The actual smell of it cooking, though, has caused her to toss cookies in guest room sinks and public bathrooms more than she is sure can be considered dignified. (They ate oysters and champagne once, and the oysters were brilliant, savory, and the champagne was transcendent, and she didn't throw up just considering that anything she was looking at was just masquerading homo sapien.) He's diseased every area of her life and yet she misses him.

 And this is why, of all the damage he did, the havoc he wreaked, Alana is the worst off. Because she was the one he never intended to become collateral damage. And her damage isn't collateral. It's a fatal wound and she's still hemorrhaging.

 Buffalo Bill caught. Will Graham meets a woman named Molly and it's better for him, Alana knows, far better than she is. The two of them were survivors adrift on the sea, clinging to the wreckage of old trauma to understand one another more intimately through that pain. But pain is about closure and healing, and where Will Graham has made peace with Hannibal about his misdeeds he carries a resentful hatred in his heart for the man. Alana? Well. She doesn't know what's in that heart of hers, much less if she even still has one. She just knows Hannibal has pulled his greatest act of all and she can't share Will's resentment. All she can recognize when she sifts through it is pain. In Bella's death Jack is distant and unfamiliar, becomes more a cordiality than a friend, more a fellow soldier than a war buddy. To some small extent, Clarice Starling fills in the cracks. Alana would never say it, but Clarice seems to her like a Will Graham success story.

 Hannibal gets out. She's the first to hear about it, because Jack, dutiful to the depths of his faithful heart, says she should be careful. What if he comes for her? He can send her an agent-- she cuts it off with a laugh that is not quite a distant, sardonic chuckle.

 "He didn't get out of prison just to eat me, Jack. He won't care about that at all. He just wants to _run."_

Her phone rings. The number is blocked. She picks it up after one shrill, high sound. The voice on the other end sounds strange and smooth through a receiver, "Good evening, Dr. Bloom."

 It should make her angry that he knows she won't trace the call. It should upset her that he's taking advantage like this. But instead she feels the filtered anger through a frosted window, staring at her nails. How interesting.

"I felt it would be rude of me to depart the country without saying goodbye." He's burned the righteousness out of her. It's useless and evaporated, now. She has no sense of justice to be served. She serves only her own ability to crawl into bed and question the possibility of this, and how it went all so wrong. It should make her furious that he can speak in that smarmy tone, laid thick like honey with the tantalizing sound of his Lithuanian motherland sitting on the tip of his tongue.

 "You're running." She says. And she's quite far outside herself. "Let me run with you."

 Silence on the line. It's a long minute and she can faintly hear chatter in the background, announcements. A tell-tale ping, the mechanical kind of voice, the one that makes you think of enthusiastic little kids exhaustively kicking the back of your chair, your tray in an 'upright position' and your electronics all turned off.

 "That would be an unwise detriment to you, Dr. Bloom."

 "You owe me." She sounds angry now, at who she doesn't know. Her teeth bite down, almost chip enamel away. _"I don't give a shit."_  


	2. Seams Too Loose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A human suit doesn't fit quite right when it's missing the smaller details. Maybe it has to be patterned, maybe the emotions are off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jumping back in time a couple chapters to move forward to present day where the Prologue started.

There was an intern at Johns Hopkins. She had blue eyes, the very bluest, the sorts of blues that made up the prisms of a finely cut diamond, and marginally waved, stupidly thick hair as black as a raven's wing. She hadn't quite grown into the way her gait made her seem taller than she was, because she was truly only five feet tall, but she had a tendency to swagger with an awkward young confidence that bespoke at least five-foot-five. When the wind was too sharp and too cold it lashed at her cheeks and left them flushed at the highest points just near her eyes, and she smiled easily at everyone but had an equal tendency to sink her teeth in mercilessly to anyone who deserved. This intern's name was Alana Marie Bloom, and this time would be the first day she was to become apparent to Hannibal Lecter. These moments were not significant because they would meet. No, they would not meet for some time. These moments were so important because they would not meet, but he would begin to build an ideal around her that would perhaps soften the blow of their actualized meeting.

He was rough around the edges, then. Working as a trauma surgeon with a bedside manner that seemed to lag a bit short of distant but concerned. He had been tailoring this persona for some time and its perfection had missed the most important part of a good suit: all the hidden stitching that pulled it together underneath. He hadn't found connection that he could understand in so long, and what he did not realize, then, was that this absence of example left the suit unfinished and in danger of collapsing the hem.

His hair was brushed back neatly into a dark ponytail that was sleek and pompous. As if he wasn't exotic enough, with the cruel slice of his cheekbones and his somewhat burgundy eyes (sometimes wine-dark, like light cradled beneath a glass of Merlot), Hannibal chose for patterned suits and the occasionally exaggerated thickness of his accent. It was not often, but it served where it did to remind he was the untouchable, a breed apart from them. Some of the interns called him 'Dracula' and that was just fine. He supposed he would privately chuckle at it in the depths of his calculating mind, being a Count of real descent. They just barely accepted his odd pigment mutation. They'd all read about that color in textbooks, after all, but he was willing to believe no doctor had ever expected they would see eyes like his in person.

Dr. Ersling told Alana Bloom that Dr. Lecter was 'weird and cruel', which actually translated to he had never seen the man eat before and he knew that on more than one occasion children had been more inclined to hide behind their parents than even look at him. These were both instances of 'weird' and 'cruel', but it was an occasional topic of discussion amongst some members of the staff. "Just stay away from him." Ersling had warned, and a small throng of chuckling interns had asked within themselves if it was Count Dracula they were all talking about. A medical savant, one of the youngest medical school graduates there had ever been, but Lecter was cold and distanced, strange, empty as a drum.

He overheard (heard) them talking about Alana Bloom. Dr. Ersling who he didn't like very much, besides. The guy was English with an accent he exaggerated from London (English accents, he found, were somehow beloved in this country) and he bragged about his surgical accomplishments when Lecter knew for a tremendous fact it was all embellishment and Ersling's stitches were just slightly crooked every time.

"A doctor changing a catheter. She even chewed the nurse out for being 'indelicate'. Can you believe it, Dan? I swear, womanly compassion. And she's a terribly pretty thing. Surprisingly good under pressure. I wouldn't have taken that from a look at her."

There were wheels turning in his head, then. They had turned on, the grating cogs, and they were shifting against the grooves with repeated motion, _click click clicking._ Why would a doctor change a catheter? That was nurse's work. A nurse indelicate, a doctor more delicate? He'd rested his hands around his styrofoam cup of coffee, cradling it to sip with detached intrigue. And maybe he didn't realize it then, because he certainly didn't, but compassion fascinated him, humanity awed him. The terminal disease known as the human condition everyone suffered from had symptoms he wanted to study, and it was beautiful, in its way. It was meant to be preserved, worshipped, for compassion, he thought, is not a standard issue quality, but a rare one, something gilded and fascinating. It left a poor taste in his mouth to have it called 'womanly'. There was nothing 'womanly' about compassion. In precisely a year, three months, and six days he would serve Alana Bloom Richard Ersling in a _Cassoulet,_ his intestine better suited for sausages, his tastefully flayed flesh for pork skin, white haricot beans stewing in the casserole.

It would be some amount of time before he met her (two weeks and one day), but he found himself mentally attributing traits to her in a faint game with himself to see if, visually, she looked like he had imagined. His human suit had begun to evolve gradually, because its missing stitches had been called 'compassion', and unwittingly he was sewing them in with a hand too clumsy on the unfamiliar needle. He needed a steady one, much surer, and soon enough he would have that.


	3. Uninvited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If he thought what he did to Will Graham was impressive, what he's done to her may as well be the fucking Prestige.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to present day. I swear to you guys I have good reason for this, it's weird, but it'll come together soon.

Alana Bloom looks in the mirror and erases everything that makes her her. It happens first with the way she takes her hair into her hands and it pools in dark, thick strands in her palms, spills over onto the genuine white of her palms and pollutes her skin in a brief moment. Somewhere, she feels all this, but it’s so deep inside herself that her breathing shuts it out. She slides a baseball cap over her head and tucks her ponytail through the back, tugging it with all the force Alana Bloom typically does not have, hard enough that the wisps of hair at the back of her neck pull. Next is a pair of dark cat eye sunglasses. Her eyes go, disappear behind obnoxious lenses. She smoothes the lines of her face with a smile practiced in a mirror, the sorts of smiles that are always false.

 He’ll think she looks absurd. She can almost hear his voice. _That does not suit._ She has been hearing his voice in the back of her head for a dog’s age, now, saying everything in the precision of his thick, terrible accent. The black yoga pants and the black, hooded sweatshirt, the grey tennis shoes. Soccer mom to the greatest extent. She flashes another brilliant smile in the mirror and, just for the hell of it, slips the glasses down her nose to look, to tilt and see her eyes, languid. Her pupils don’t dilate, but her teeth feel too big, too crowded for her mouth, and she’s hollow, cheap. She shudders and presses the glasses back onto their perch. She doesn’t understand the sight, and for a moment it resonates. She’ll feel a pang somewhere, but it’s brief, a drop in the ocean.

 What a laugh her life has become. Her eyes aren’t more than dull bruises embedded in her face, her collarbones fight against her skin in a way she has never liked very much, and her wrists have gotten thin enough to snap off at the tendon. Everyone is trying to move on but she’s stuck, stuck, stuck, and the only way she can move on is by giving this all one last scrambling try and if it fails letting it fall into nothing forever.

 This is so fucked up.

 Somewhere in the back of her head she hears his voice, _This is detrimental to your health, Doctor Bloom._

 “Fuck you.” She says out loud, her teeth tight together, the sentence just a hiss.

 She doesn’t hope that he won’t kill her. She doesn’t hope he will. Honestly, she doesn’t hope much either way.

 The airport’s waiting and so is he, if he’s even still waiting at all. And if he isn’t, she’s going to hunt him like a hungry wolf.

 

* * *

 

_Months Previous…_

 She hates him. She doesn’t hate him. Not hating him is the absolute worst part. It makes her feel confused like a dog wandering a new house after waiting to be adopted for twelve years. There’s no logical sense to the conflict of it, and she doesn’t dwell, and just phases back to whatever the hell she was doing in that moment. Losses of time, she always thinks, distant. Falling in love with a serial killer who you half-hate like the black plague might do that to you. Letting him manipulate you into it without you ever knowing it was manipulation might do it even worse. Nothing is safe, now. He’s taken the most sacred thing she ever believed in and perverted it: love. And now she can’t trust it anymore. The departure of Will’s dogs leaves a gaping absence in her life, but she can’t bear to fill it with another animal. She can’t trust the idea of love ever again. She thinks if she took out her heart, by this point, she wouldn’t know how her own physician hadn’t seen the cancer. It’s blackened, isn’t it? Hannibal had never turned his cruelty on her, but she thinks his kindness was worse. She would’ve preferred his cruelty.

 The _Method of Loci_ is a mnemonic device invented by the Romans and the Greeks to recall information with the usefulness of memory enhancement. It has always fascinated Alana Bloom, to some extent. If she closes her eyes she can still hear his voice when he explained it in another life. _First, you build in your mind a place with which you are familiar, most loved. Choose a museum, Doctor Bloom. I’ve seen you most at home moving through well-loved art, and a record room won’t jar the realism. Now remember a consistent path—it’s important to walk it frequently at first, to walk and walk and walk the structure. Your mind teaching itself to work around where you wear your footsteps. Pepper your route with storage locations, or choose one room, but at first it is beneficial to scatter. This technique will be your memory, tangible to your mind. Draw it out—rudimentary, Doctor Bloom—and designate your locations, specifics, remember it against your memory to be sure you’re accurate. Begin to scatter information about to be remembered. Symbols will do nicely, and while mine is rigid and hyper realistic, yours may be better for a touch of fancy—of course, I do not mean to offend or imply you as ‘flighty’, but you’re less rooted in routine than I. Walk the annals of those halls imagined, discover parts of yourself you otherwise wouldn’t have considered. Be wary, your mind is a weapon with two very sharp edges. Be sure you’re holding it with your hands around the hilt and not the blade._

 She wishes it didn’t ache her to remember all these discussions so clearly that happened _before_ and above all she wishes she couldn’t hear the haunted warning in his words: _be wary._ She wishes she didn’t know all about Hannibal Lecter’s broken mind, the one he doesn’t think is in disrepair, but he can’t see the floorboards rotting because the wood’s so far beneath the marble.

 Sometimes she closes her eyes (her Memory Palace is similar to the Art Institute of Chicago, she took his suggestion, then, a place well-loved and frequented) and she sits captivated before the Toulouse-Lautrec paintings and he visits, unbidden, unwanted, but so wanted, and he’s hazy around the edges like some exalted entity. He speaks to her, dark and smothering, more a part of the walls than a part of his own self. Even here he is a god, but he told her, once, to be wary of where she was holding the weapon and she’s sure, now, can look down and see it clear as day, that her palms are sticky with her own blood and the blade’s been biting in right to the bone.

 “You weren’t careful,” Hannibal says, smoke and shadow, sex and death, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

 “Shakespeare’s trite for you, Hannibal.” She drones, distant, “C’mon, you can do better than that.”

 The absurdity of talking to her brain is clear. And she regrets bitterly, here, that it’s not even in her own control that she can make him feel present.

She doesn’t visit her own Memory Palace much after that. The first time it does happen she pays him a visit in the flesh the next day and she’s reminded and he isn’t sex and death and dark and smoke at all. He’s just a lie decomposing in a cell.


	4. Natsukashii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (adj.) 懐かしい: of some small thing that brings you suddenly, joyously back to fond memories, not with a wistful longing for one's past, but with an appreciation of the good times.

The first time he fell in love with her was the first time she ever saved a life. 

He did not know it when it happened. There was no way, with his stinted emotional development and his difficulty recognizing his own feelings, then, he could have known. He knew only that it was a piece of him that had seemed to call to other pieces. He couldn't identify it at the time, and he would not be able to for several years. Falling in love was never an occasion for Hannibal Lecter. It was not a grand thing, not a gratuitous affair. Hannibal Lecter fell in love the way most people drank their morning coffee: just as routine and just as satisfying. No trumpets to usher it in. No pomp. No circumstance.

He'd caught her shouting at Dr. Ersling to move as she applied appropriated pressure to a man rapidly hemorrhaging, and he thought it mystifying that this was the same woman who had evidently voluntarily changed a catheter. That this was the Dr. Bloom whose bedside manner had become the stuff of legends. She was small, smaller than he could imagine, and he wasn't a large man. But her eyes were the blue of a fresh, easily tapped vein and her hair fell thick and dark around her shoulders like the molten waves in obsidian. He had seen her save that life, then, with all the detached wonder in his eyes, but she was beautiful and he had found scores of women beautiful. Throngs of them, even, he was hard-pressed to believe a woman could be truly aesthetically ugly. But it echoed again in his mind. She had saved a life and he had watched her, and he had no way of knowing that had been her first. Did not know one day he would become another breathing body on her list of lives saved.

He turned on a heel immediately and dipped into the fluorescent shock of the break room. Tapping a nail on the table with his coffee thermos in hand, he counted exactly thirty seconds before, a little erratic, scented a bit of high adrenaline and deep breaths, Alana Bloom barreled in. The jumpy quickness of a young woman just toeing the line between life and death. He took her in and once she had stopped, cursing under her breath at the cold coffee, he gestured to the table before him with a grand swoop of his arm and asked, "Would you care to join me, Dr. Bloom? That sludge has been sedentary for hours. It isn't more than mud."

She sat and offered her own sadly empty thermos to him, a trusted bond between them both. Soldiers in the trenches, though she always said hello to him each morning and he had shared more than half of his homemade energy bars (blueberries and oats and cinnamon and honey to bind it), and to Alana that was enough to echo 'friendship'. He was always kind to her, and terribly polite. She didn’t understand why the other doctors called him cruel or strange. She thought, really, he just seemed very different and that loneliness clung to him like mothballs to an old coat in the attic.

“Thank you, Dr. Lecter. That’s very kind of you. It’s been—an afternoon.” She met his red eyes for but a second, and then felt, with that, a fraction of the tension alleviate from her spine.

"Your adept understanding is quite extraordinary. I will admit, the gentleman you shouldered, albeit to the benefit of that victim's life, will be coming up with a few additional bruises to his ego and his person." This is where I would chuckle, he thought, staring with detachment at his own statement. He did breathe a rasp of faint air through his nose, but it was only passable, like a tickle in his throat.

"Ersling will live." She said, voice laden with a touch of contempt for the man. She didn't particularly enjoy his company, and she didn't particularly feel he was fully competent. His stitches were sort of crooked every single time, she would eventually tell Hannibal, and he would hum with approval. "I'm just-- I'm glad I caught him in time."

The adrenaline was thrumming away gradually, and his coffee was very finely brewed, she found, weary and a little boneless in the seat, now, cradled by it. Hannibal watched her with the eyes of a predatory bird, and she couldn't help but briefly notice that in the edge of a faint light the color could almost be aubergine, like the skin of an eggplant glared in the sun.

"Had you not, this hospital would be short one human life. That victim's family would be short a single member. Your clarity has been very valuable." Her hands were trembling and he leaned back in his chair, a polite trick to look at the whole of her and focus on her fingers without an obvious gaze. A doctor, after all, never wants to discuss shaking hands. He unwrapped his own protein bar from flawlessly packed cellophane, not hungry, but merely to remind her that there was a humanity to him, and that was extended by visibly human tasks. "You should breathe, Dr. Bloom. I have a word I find-- teacup, for instance-- that when said in couplet intervals soothes me. A word, a beat, again. I can imagine Dr. Ersling is very frustrating when he does not perform up to par."

"Ah, he's only human. Everybody makes mistakes." For a moment he said the word, and she tried to imagine him alone, speaking such a ludicrous little two-syllable thing to calm his nerves. It coaxed from her a laugh that bubbled to the surface and her hands had stopped shaking when she said, "teacup, huh?"

When she smiled he watched her from behind the frosted glass window of his abstract mind. Was it painful, to smile so sincerely? Did it hurt, to attribute such realism? Beside him he saw himself in shadow like a creature, like a blackened representation. In his memory palace he looked at it, and he replicated the same expression as she, feeling it on his own face. The shadow followed suit, and outside his own mind his face was third and last to smile. He had forgotten the protein bar and only mirrored her expression with a thin, tight upturn of his lips.

"But he was very close with this profession, and here, very close doesn't quite--" he leaned forward and looked for the words, indecisive, wondering if his indecision constructed more authentic mortality, "--cut it."

His deadpan had torn her asunder. She put her head on the table, cheek turned aside, and she began to laugh. Great, authentic, undignified guffaws of laugher that sent fat tears rolling down her flushed cheeks and unladylike snorts between each scrambling sound. "--cut it! Oh god I can't--!" She gasped out, pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to stop the onslaught of fatigued but altogether satisfying tears.

Stepping outside the moment it is here, at 10:32 at night, that Hannibal Lecter fell in love with Alana Bloom. Deep into the furthest reaches of their relationship, beneath glass, outside it, a free man or a shackled one, he will always remember 10:32 on September 2nd at Johns Hopkins. It will be a memory he draws on in loneliness, in happiness, in contentment, even in contrition. He will say he fell in love with her then not because it was beautiful. Not delicate or gentle, not even eloquent. But her laugh was something much better. It was _hers._

"I've a slice of pecan pie in the refrigerator, if you may feel so inclined, Dr. Bloom." He forgot to enunciate 'slice' but it didn't seem to matter. Her head still fell back, a fresh bout of laughter free of her throat, and it went on for a good minute until she was breathing in small rises and falls of her chest and staring at the discolored ceiling with a painful grin affixed on her face (not a bad pain, no, a very happy one).

"--slice.... man. Thank you, Dr. Lecter. I needed that." She was still in the throes of the aftermath, and he thought he might like her best smiling. Her eyes were the same color as the Mediterranean on a particularly beautiful morning, and he enjoyed being reminded of that, of the water off Tuscany.

It took him a moment before he placed both hands on the table-- a sign of trust and honesty, he reminded himself, the way he would show her his hands and knuckles and palms to know they were empty-- and he spoke, "Permission, if I may and am not offensively forward, to ask if you would join me in seeking out more edible pastures for the evening, once we have adequately served our masters."

She had always wondered about him. Perpetually playing solo, and for a man who was not old (though he was not exactly young, either) he conducted himself with an enormous gravitas. Atlas' shoulders if she had ever seen them, both figurative and literal. She wondered if he ever knew that others could see the things he carried just by the sense of feeling alone.

"I would like that very much. Did you have something in mind?"

"Ladies' choice is customary. I asked, but I would defer to your palette." Truthfully he was curious. Whether she would keep to her own tastes or pander to his. It was a worthwhile interaction, he was beginning to discover, to gauge and measure another living human being for their decisions.

And she took the weight of the question with the true seriousness it carried. She thought he might be shy, might be arrogant, might be something of both those things, and he always seemed to have such I excellent culinary tastes. So after a long deliberation, she had ticked through each choice but went instead for blessed simplicity, "Ever been to the Thames Street Oyster House?"

There was something in his smile that forced itself free, a flash of predatory teeth. He was pleased with her choice and, a courtesy, he allowed it to strike like flint across his face, "I cannot say I have, but I will never turn down the promise of potentially exquisite seafood."


	5. A Moment of Lucidity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Starling sent into a lion's cage surely wouldn't survive.

So Alana Bloom walks into a mental institution. Frederick Chilton asks, “Why the hell are you still doing this?”

“Because, Frederick,” says Alana, “Go fuck yourself.”

* * *

 Her anger gets him punished. She says it out of pure needed defense. Because Chilton had looked at her with a sincerity she didn’t even think he could manage, with something like human sympathy, and she is so absolutely repulsed by the premise of pity from this crawling tar pit of human filth whose organs have all been reattached that she cannot spit anything but bleeding vitriol out of her mouth. For anyone who knows Alana Bloom this is both uncharacteristic and strange, but she has been feeling it for a long time, and now the detachment is beginning to settle in. It’s rattling her, feeling more unhinged. She doesn’t usually bite that way. 

“Thank you.” Hannibal says, watching her with his maroon eyes. They’re very black in the dark, and his complexion is uselessly sallow. She’s seeing his synthetic humanity hemorrhage, watching it leave like the way his skin seems to slough off his bones, too thin. “I was looking so forward to Teletubbies this evening.”

Chilton’s adolescent punishments, how he does love them. Forcing Hannibal to watch awful television and listen to horrific music and taking everything out of that cell he can.

“What have _you_ done for _me_ lately?” She says, gathering her hair into a high ponytail.

“I don’t know what I have done for you lately.” She can hear the _I_ before done as he would have enunciated it, where it would have been spoken—has it been years ago? “I’m curious to hear what your version of me has been doing for you, however. Do tell me how I occupy your mind.”

This game is so outdated that offense is old hat. She would be angry if she weren’t so tired. Being his enemy is exhausting. Being his friend is fatiguing. Being anything to him seems to take all the strength a person would need to hold up the Empire State Building on their back.

“I think the other night I dreamed about your awful joke in the break room, the ‘couldn’t cut it joke’…”

* * *

 “Hello, Dr. Bloom.”

 Clarice Starling’s hair is faintly auburn and the sun makes it lighter, paints it an enthralled shade of almost-ginger that makes Alana think of the poem in Stephen King’s _IT_ about January embers. Her eyes are the blue of a young pup, and her West Virginian twang is buried beneath an absolute desire to hide it from indignity. Alana notes it is not buried completely and there is something to that. Clarice Starling, she thinks, wants the world to know she will not entirely rebuild herself for its purpose.

 In years, Hannibal Lecter will tell Alana that she sees Clarice Starling in her.

“FBI Agent-in-training Clarice Starling, I presume?” She asks. She knows the answer, though it’s a politeness.

“Yes, ma’am, it’s very nice to meet you.” She flashes a smile that would seem simple to anyone else, but Alana reads the soft touch of unease to it. It’s a rushed anxiety, the sort that doesn’t bode well with someone who fidgets often, prefers to move constantly. She’s reading Clarice’s motions and actions immediately, especially for the nature of this appointment. She’s already apologizing for the ‘ma’am’ but Alana waves it off, not bothered in the slightest. If anyone is allowed to address how old she’s gotten, she thinks, it’s the young who notice it. “It was Special Agent Crawford who pointed me in your direction. He thought it might be of some help to speak to someone who has better insight on Hannibal Lecter before I interview him myself, and it seemed to be his belief that you have somethin’ of an expertise you can lend me.”

She notes, with some worming comfort, that Clarice calls him _Hannibal Lecter._ Full name, like he is a living, breathing human being with human cells and hair follicles, and like he was given a name by parents who had him and he was born on earth, in a country, to a human way of life. It’s a little relieving. No matter what anyone’s done, she always feels uncomfortable when it’s his professional name people call him by, like the ‘doctor’ gives them some distance. She won't tolerate anyone treated like an insubordinate. She's learned a lot from psychiatry, and principally it's a respect for human life.

She has a PhD in Hannibal Lecter. She might not know the rivulets of his skin or the intimate details, might not know but for once what his lips tasted like (she carries this thought like a strand of hair in a locket, and it drives her further and further insane), but she knows the veins in the backs of his hands and the ones in his wrists. She knows that he avoids saying the word ‘pretty’ because in his accent it is both strenuous and hilarious. She knows the teeth he will try to bite this girl with. She knows their indents like dental records. Above all, she knows he cannot be trusted. That last detail was the final fact in her dissertation, after all.

“When you sit in front of him, shoulders back, chest out, chin tilted up, hands in your lap. It’s important your palms stay upturned, like you aren’t hiding anything. He’ll read your body language, and he’ll pick at your bad posture.”

“I haven’t had much time to think on my bad posture.” Clarice admits. Alana still reading, the tones in her voice, they’re humorous, a little kind, but not without resilience. Not without a small sting for criticism. But she does pull back, does listen, and does mirror precisely what Alana asks.

“Yes. Like that.”

“You must be a very good psychiatrist, to notice all that.”

 “Just years of observation.” Crawford knows, Clarice knows, the entire community surrounding the FBI, the incident, and most of the psychiatric world knows. There’s no use in tiptoeing around what has made her something of a pariah in the professional world. It’s all a sewing circle and she figures hopelessly visiting him doesn’t help her reputation at all. She’s still trying to fix him but, mostly, she’s trying to fix herself in the reflection of his glass. “What’s your perfume?”

 “Sometimes L’Air Du Temps.” Admittedly impressed, Alana feels a bit more present, a bit more chipper. Clarice Starling must be capable, to roll with the odd questions. The way she pronounces that will not do, Alana knows. He will tear her to shreds for those words. Alana mentally tumbles through her listing of perfumes. Fooling Hannibal Lecter is not something people often manage to do, but if anyone can, she can do it. The process is two-way, after all. To have gotten into _her_ head, he has left himself open, and she’s been inside _his._ It feels almost like some victory to be doing this.

 She’ll have to find something that is in adequate taste but is not particularly extravagant. If one puts a chimpanzee in a suit, after all, it is still a chimpanzee, just one wearing an Armani. Not that Clarice Starling is a chimpanzee. Though she is particularly boyish, in a navy blue polo and a pair of loose, beige cargo pants, she’s a pretty girl with brightness about her. Hannibal will try to turn that off quickly. Hannibal hates the light, these days.

 “I have a bottle of Gucci Rush. I’ll be happy to lend it to you.”

 “How would he smell that all the way behind that glass?” She’s leaning in, then, like listening to someone tell a story out of a children’s book. They’ve just gotten to the big bad wolf about to eat granny, and his jowls are salivating, and his jaws are wide open, and somewhere in the kitchen there’s a filet mignon made of thigh sizzling. She’s very glad of outdoor cafes, where she never has to smell food being cooked, where they aren’t restaurants with the nauseating sight of _steak._ She breathes out in spite of the thought.

 “He has a very peculiarly developed olfactory talent. It’s a little bit of a parlor trick for him. He’ll comment on what you’re wearing to try to throw you off-balance. Probably he’ll do it for shock factor. But act impressed with it. Once he thinks you aren't interested, once he thinks he can't scare you at all, he'll preen his feathers prettily and then he'll turn to stone.” She could recite him in boredom, like reading lifelessly off a pamphlet. The perfume is a spiteful thing on her end-- but she knows it will be a gift she's giving Clarice. If he smells her specific scent on Clarice he'll be more likely to talk. He'll recognize it, and even if on some sub level of his mind he will be more responsive, he will consciously make it a game to lord over Alana next visit. She'll take the rod for that, deserve the whipping. He can't hurt her anymore, and now she knows she can take it.

 "Dr. Bloom-- it really ain't none of my business, but," Alana is ramrod straight in the seat and very patient, and she isn't aware, not truly, of the laser vision she's got pointed at Clarice, like boring holes. The compassion is bleeding out of her, and maybe she's more a snake than a chameleon-- maybe she has shed her skin and under it she has found his, much tougher than her smooth surface. She thinks if you dragged your fingertips across her now they might snag, but she wouldn't be able to tell you if it was on cracks or serpentine scales. "--are you okay?"

 She hasn't thought about that word in a long time. 'Okay'. When people say 'okay' she has learned to understand the answer they are searching for is long term, not short. They want to know if you have been, will be, and are 'okay', not if you are only then. 'Alright' is the general word, she has picked up, that is used when they're only concerned with a single moment. And when she breathes out she exhales a touch of what feels like Hannibal, and for the first time in awhile she feels like Alana Bloom, present in that moment behind her eyes.

 "Not particularly, but I think you can both understand at appreciate that, in your line of future work." She doesn't lie to Clarice Starling. She figures after dissecting her with such absolute abandon it's only polite she be truthful. "But I'll be fine. None of that 'ain't', though."

 "I'm sorry." The girl has intelligent eyes, unguarded, but smart. They pick up on things quick, and they know when to drop things, too. "Talking to you I don't think I realized. I hardly say 'ain't', anymore."

 "Good habit to break." Alana is sure she is smiling, and it feels like one. An actual smile, with teeth and everything. "Keep it broken."

 "Yes, ma'am." Clarice says, apologetic. But her hands are up immediately, palms bare, like held at gunpoint, Alana's eyebrow raised pointedly for the second slip (and palms upturned, empty, trustworthy, maybe Clarice will be alright after all), "Sorry. Impulse."

 "Habit." Alana corrects. She's still smiling, and that's what matters. "Which is fine."

 Alana is glad for the pane of glass that will separate this girl and Hannibal Lecter. Now he can only figuratively eat her alive.


End file.
